Patient defined outcomes

In medical care delivery systems the question is being asked: "What works?"Purchasers and payers need to know what value they are getting for dollars spent in benefits, not just their total expenditures; case managers and hospital administrators must decide which services can be substituted or eliminated to control costs while maintaining quality; and clinicians and patients try to select from different treatment options those that will improve health, not just reduce length of stay.Informing such choices and trade offs requires ".... the improvement of methods for identi- fying key features of medical care that are associated with favourable patient outcomes (my emphasis), so that these features can be preserved despite the constraints imposed by an increasingly cost-conscious healthcare environment."